Something That Doesn’t Love a Wall

The world is divided into two categories: those who love neat, clear, divisions;
and those who can live with, or even delight in, the doubtful border areas.
The first delight in policing the boundaries, the second in exploring the liminal
areas, as in Saki’s story about “those uncomfortable piebald times
when a third of the people were Pagan, and a third Christian, and the biggest
third of all just followed whichever religion the Court happened to profess.”

My mood varies: I see the importance of keeping black-and-white moral areas
from dissolving into a uniform gray, but I feel that other things benefit from
a lack of hard edges. With roots in an American Border State, I enjoy both lobster
roll and spoon bread, in which I see a happy complementarity, not a contradiction.

Europeans wish that Germany and France could have seen in Alsace a via media
instead of a battlefield. Alsatians especially wish it. Their capital, Strasbourg,
now houses the European Parliament. Alsatians would like national identities
to be blurred in a Europe composed of regions whose peace and security is guaranteed
by new European structures.

Despite its German dialect, Alsace went to France in the seventeenth century.
The Germans reclaimed it at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and
the French repossessed it in 1918. The Germans took it back again in 1940, and
proceeded with a cruel program of Germanization: The government forbade the
wearing of the beret (Das Tragen von Franzosenmutzen im Elsass ist verboten)
and translated French names into German ones. “Granjean” became
“Grosshaus,” “Boulanger” “Becker,” and “Meunier”
“Müller.” Alsatian boys were drafted into the SS. They came
back to occupy France, and herded the villagers of Oradour into a church and
burned them alive. These war criminals were, in French eyes, French citizens.
Every European war is a civil war, but for Alsatians the conflict is within
their souls.

Is Alsace French or German? When my family hiked there, we bounced back and
forth between them. When it can’t remember a German word, my mind throws
in a French one. By law, after 1945, Alsatians speak French in public, but it’s
garnished with sauerkraut. I found congenial native speakers who said, “Je
voudrais zwei Wurstchen, et mit senft, s’il vous plait,” and
who lived in Dambach-la-ville, Haut Koenigsbourg, Maison forestiere de Tollenloch,
or Carrefour Müller-Appfel. They also speak Alsatian, a completely German
dialect. In Turckheim, a night watchman sings an Alsatian hymn at the city gates:
“God geb uns all a good nat.” I wondered if the Alsatian
was for tourists, but in a small hotel, in which my room was over the kitchen,
I heard Alsatian during washing-up. It survives.

Alsatians, when not growing vines or praying, built fortifications. The Pagan
Wall, six miles long and still ten feet high in places, is pre-Roman, and surrounds
the chief pilgrimage church of Alsace, Mont St. Odile. Every crag has its ruined
castle, built and then destroyed in the endless border warfare between French
and Germans. From a ruined castle 25 miles away we first spotted the towers
of Strasbourg Cathedral, of which Goethe wrote: “My soul was infused with
a feeling of immense grandeur which, because it consisted in thousands of harmonizing
details, I was able to savor and enjoy, but may by no means understand and explain.
They say it is thus with the joys of heaven, and how often I returned to savor
such joys on earth, to embrace the gigantic spirit expressed in the work of
our brothers of yore!” The “our brothers” stakes out Strasbourg
as German. Like the Germans at times, the cathedral combines beauty and terror
into the sublime. It is awesome, even alien. It towers like the kingdom of God.
Inside it is so vast that it loses all human scale. It was not built for human
beings, and scarcely looks like it was built by them.

In Colmar, at the start of our journey, we saw the Isenheim altar of Mathis
der Maler. Grunewald depicted a Christ so tortured that the painting became
hallucinogenic. It was for the insane, who saw him suffering as they did. They
had St. Anthony’s Fire, ergot poisoning, from an analogue of LSD, the
same poison that may have provoked the Salem witch trials.

Rationality and peace are rare; a society can be destroyed from both without
and within. Europe has made peace with itself and its past; religion and ideology
and nationalism have ended in exhaustion and a desire to enjoy the small pleasures
of life, and they are true pleasures: the vine, the shaded mountain path, the
half-timbered town overflowing with flowers. But the police broke up an Islamicist
plot to bomb the Strasbourg Christmas market of 2000.

Europe’s nightmares are not yet over. It has rejected the transcendent
hope of another world and the only One who can give meaning to the suffering
that comes unexpectedly in this world, even to the peaceful corners of Alsace,
between a Germany and a France who have at last made peace.

Leon J. Podles holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia and has worked as a teacher and a federal investigator. He is the author of The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity and the forthcoming License to Sin (both from Spence Publishing). Dr. Podles and his wife have six children and live in Naples, Florida. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

“Something That Doesn’t Love a Wall” first appeared in the October 2002 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

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